Background… Should a Man Be Writing a Women’s History of Bethel? 31 Oct 2024 As soon as I announced my sabbatical project last spring, an otherwise supportive friend asked a question I haven't been able to shake: "You will be interpreting as a male.…
Students… Bethel’s First Women Seminarians 28 Oct 20249 Dec 2024 Long before the 1972 start of our project's narrative, Bethel Theological Seminary enrolled women. When Adolf and Virgil Olson published that school's 75th anniversary history in 1946, their exhaustive list…
Sources… Student Newspapers as Historical Evidence 25 Oct 20249 Dec 2024 Perhaps the hardest thing to do as a Bethel historian is to recover the experience of the university's largest constituency: its students. That's partly because of the sheer size and…
Women in Ministry How Bethel and Its Denomination Debated Women’s Roles 21 Oct 20249 Dec 2024 If you want to understand how evangelical Christians debated the roles of women and men as the Seventies turned into the Eighties, you could do worse than to use Bethel…
Background… How Do I Write History to Which I’m an Eyewitness? 17 Oct 20249 Dec 2024 I'm back from some sabbatical travels in Illinois and Alabama and ready to start writing again. I'll have new material here next week, but first something I had meant to…
Uncategorized… Girlhood (It’s complicated) 1 Oct 2024 I'll be out of town for the better part of the next two weeks, to do an event in Illinois for the Pascal Study Center and then to help run…
Faculty and Staff… The Gender Demographics of the Bethel Faculty: 1986-2024 25 Sep 20249 Dec 2024 In part one of this brief series, we saw that the share of women on the Bethel College faculty actually declined through the Sixties before starting to grow slowly during…
Faculty and Staff… The Gender Demographics of the Bethel Faculty: 1958-1985 24 Sep 20249 Dec 2024 "In the concept of the Christian body," wrote Carl Lundquist during his last decade as Bethel president, "every member is important and essential to the others. There are no 2nd.…
Historiography… Women in Earlier Bethel Histories: “Contribution” and “Oppression” 18 Sep 20249 Dec 2024 There had been a chapter on education in the Baptist General Conference in the Centenary History of that denomination (1952) by Adolf Olson, who had previously collaborated with his son…
Quantitative… Bethel’s Most Gendered Majors 16 Sep 20249 Dec 2024 Have Bethel's women been more likely to study certain fields than others? Have some majors historically been dominated by women, or by men? Has that changed over the years? I'm…
The Women of Bethel 